The good news is if you want a high end card you don’t have
to spend $300 to get it. Usually, the Radeon 9700 Pro cards retail for about
$250, putting them halfway between ATI’s most aggressive midrange card, and the
ultra high end 9800 Pro. Aggressive
midrange card, you say? As you might know, ATI unveiled the 9600 XT
of course. (There is no particular reason why we keep linking to the Unreal2K3
benchmark, it just happens to have all the cards we keep talking about). ATI
is starting to take preorders on the 9600 XT for $199 on their website, but we
digress. Edit: Several readers have pointed out to me that the 9600 XT will be shipping with the single player version of Half Life 2. Naturally, if you were going to buy Half Life 2 anyway, you save yourself about $30 bucks or so by going with the XT card.

Derek and Anand trumped ATI’s 9600 XT the midrange champion,
but as most of us conscious shoppers know, price can be a larger deciding
factor than performance. Gigacube and Sapphire both market 9600 Pro cards for
$50 less than the XT. It all depends if your $50 (25% percent of the cost) is
worth 4 FPS in UT2K3 (13% percent performance). Nay, $150 is the right
price for a midrange video card. However, in 8-10 weeks it sounds very
plausible that the 9600 XT could fall to that magic $150 level.

Kris, you really should mention that the $50 premium a 9600XT commands over a 9600 Pro includes a copy of HL2, and that the XT's 25% faster core will likely translate into 25% faster performance, as HL2 in DX9 mode seems to be shader-bound.Reply